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Major Bitcoin Exchange Bittrex’s Customers Have Been Unable to Withdraw For Months

Last Updated March 4, 2021 5:03 PM
Joseph Young
Last Updated March 4, 2021 5:03 PM

On various online bitcoin communities, forums, and social media platforms, clients of major US-based bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex have expressed their concerns over long-lasting withdrawal issues.

Bittrex Verification Issues, Resolution

Several users disclosed that withdrawal of funds on the Bittrex cryptocurrency trading platform have been delayed for many weeks, up to a month, for reasons made unclear to users.

According to a Bittrex customer, the withdrawal issues and delays on the Bittrex trading platform have emerged due to the platform’s verification issues. As with every other regulated cryptocurrency exchange, Bittrex has different withdrawal, deposit, and trading limits for users. For traders to increase their daily withdrawal limits, they are required to submit government-issued IDs, passports, selfies, and additional sensitive information.

However, because of the rapid increase in the user base of Bittrex and surge in the volume of verification requests, the process of increasing the daily trading limit and completing account verification often take over a month for regular users.

“The next step is for you to submit a Support Ticket, which I then completed. My Support ticket was opened on November 6 with not a single response from anyone at Bittrex. This is going on for almost 30 days now. I updated the ticket many times to no avail,” a Bittrex trader told Business Insider in an interview. 

Earlier this month, Bittrex spokesperson said in a statement provided to Business Insider that the company is implementing various solutions to ease the verification process and increase the daily trading limit of users in a prompt manner.

The spokesperson also noted that the company has reached out to all of the users and traders affected by the verification issues. “Bittrex recently reached out to its affected customers to explain more fully the improvements we have been making to our identity verification procedures and the reasons some accounts may have been affected. A small percentage of our overall user base has experienced delays in getting their account issues resolved, and we have recently added more staff to address those delays,” said the Bittrex spokesperson.

On November 29, Bittrex founder rami Kawach announced that the company had completed an upgrade on the back-end system of Bittrex, as a part of a initiative to address the rapid user growth and request load on the trading platform.

“Due to unprecedented user growth and request load, we are currently performing upgrades on our back-end system. We are attempting to minimize trading impact but we expect short rolling outages on all markets,” wrote Rami. 

In the upcoming months, the Bittrex team aims to roll out additional updates and improvements onto its back-end system to address the exponential growth of its user base.

Similar Problems on Other Exchanges

In May of 2017, prominent bitcoin blogger and trader WhalePanda revealed that he had waited more than a month to be verified on Kraken, another major US-based bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange headquartered in San Francisco.

“Been waiting for a month to get level 3 verification on Kraken too,” said  WhalePanda. In response, Kraken Support stated that the verifications team is backlogged, due to a surge in verification and daily limit increase requests.

CCN.com reached out to Bittrex for a statement, but the company was not available at the time of reporting.

Over the past few weeks, Bittrex has hired 12-year Amazon veteral Jim Waschak as chief operating officer and former Homeland Security Department Deputy General Counsel Kiran Raj as chief strategy officer to streamline the process of verifying user applications and better managing the platform’s operations.

On December 15, Bittrex CEO Bill Shihara stated: 

“Our mission is to develop the most trusted cryptocurrency exchange in the world, and we believe the breadth of experience that these individuals bring will be critical to achieving that goal. They will drive our enduring commitment to foster a secure and regulated trading environment that creates more opportunities for blockchain technology and the future of finance and security.”

Featured image from Shutterstock.